Sun and Privacy Shades for Your Ports

EASY TO MAKE • DIY • low cost and featherweight

When you’re boating in the South, it’s all about the sun. They don’t call it the Sunshine State, the Sun Coast or the Sun Belt for nothing! But sunshine radiating into your boat’s cabin means additional heat in our southern climates where every degree of cooling matters. Those uncovered ports may seem small but add them up and they can contribute a lot of heat if not shaded and insulated.

Some Common Solutions

Many boat owners cover their ports with pieces of home foam insulation board. This material has good insulating properties but has some downsides. For starters, with pink foam on the inside and reflective foil on the outside, your beautiful boat starts to look like an old farm shed with insulated blocked windows. And from the interior, it’s hard to get a clean professional finished edge to the cut pieces. Do you really want to see ragged pieces of pink foam next to your teak or cherry?
Plastic corrugated sign material, purchased at home improvement stores or retail sign companies has been another popular material for port coverings. However, we discovered first-hand that this material is very difficult to shape. You can cut it with scissors or an X-Acto knife, but we were not happy with the level of finish. Our attempts to follow the template ended up looking like a grade-school blunt-tipped scissors project. That meant locating a place with CNC routing to cut the material precisely to our template with clean professional edges. No problem—until we found out that would drive the cost up to about $12 per shade. And subsequent replacement in a far-off locale would be a nightmare. That option was out.
Stiff-material solutions are not only difficult to craft yourself, but are cumbersome to store. Sometimes you want shade, but sometimes you want to look out the ports and have light. Stiff foam board is bulky to store and corrugated plastic risks scratching your interior wood finishes if not stored properly while underway. We finally concluded it was time to “think outside the box” for a new material and solution.

Think Like a Kid: Fun Foam

We searched home improvement, hardware, fabric and craft stores. Our mission was to find a lightweight material that had insulating properties and would block the sun yet let in some light while providing privacy when dockside. We needed a material that we could cut ourselves with scissors and that could easily removed and stored without scratching. Ideally, the installation wouldn’t require extensive fasteners such as Velcro tabs. The material needed to be impermeable to moisture, washable and inexpensive so we could easily replace them if a shade was damaged or became dirty over time. That’s when we discovered “Creatology Fun Foam,” rugged, high-density flexible foam sheets available at Michaels Arts & Crafts, a nationwide chain. These 12×18 inch sheets cost only $0.99 each and are available in many different colors. (We suggest a light color for reflecting heat and brightening the interior.) With our port sizes, we could cut two port shades out of one sheet, making this 8-port project’s total cost $4!

Materials Needed:

Creatology foam sheets (each sheet is 12×18 inches)
Kraft paper for templates
Ruler
Compass with pencil
Pencil
Scissors (preferably fine-tipped and curved, such as nail scissors)

Done in an Hour

To make your own flexible foam port shades, begin by making a precise template (see photo 1) of your port on Kraft paper using a straight ruler and a compass. The foam is flexible so you should be able to cut precise insets to tuck under tabs or through a knob to hold it in place without additional fasteners. Then, once you have a precise paper template, trace it onto a sheet of the Creatology foam with a pencil. Cut it out, cutting just inside your pencil tracing to remove the pencil marks. Repeat for each port.

You’re Done!

Leave the shades in place for sun protection or for nighttime privacy. Rotate them if you want to let in partial light or look out the port. Pop them off and store anywhere without worrying about weight or scratching. If they get dusty or dirty, simply wash them with soap and water.